


The man who sits at the devil's right hand

by dogandmonkeyshow



Series: Unforgivable Things [5]
Category: Justified, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Moriarty really was everywhere, tying up loose ends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-31
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2021-01-15 17:29:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21256982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dogandmonkeyshow/pseuds/dogandmonkeyshow
Summary: Mycroft couldn't help himself; he felt a faint shiver of excitement in his stomach at the opening gambit of the game, even though he'd known this was the reason he'd travelled thousands of miles at no small personal and professional risk. He might have invested years of effort so that he could avoid just this sort of drudgery, but this moment, the opening moves of the chess match—he never tired of this.





	The man who sits at the devil's right hand

**Author's Note:**

  * For [perverse_idyll](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perverse_idyll/gifts).

> A little niblet to tie up a loose end from _It's not the puzzle you were expecting_ and _Some thigs we do are unforgivable..._. If you haven't read those, you should read [ Chapter 11 of Puzzle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5148155/chapters/12458486) before reading this. Note that Puzzle and Unforgivable were written post-S3 and makes no attempt at canonity on some points.
> 
> A gift for perverse_idyll, for being such a good enabler, and for declaring it as, "the meeting of the highest of foreheads and most devious of minds". Bless.

“I am going to be straight with you, sir. I am not a nice man. I am not a good man. But I am not an evil man.”

Mycroft watched the dishevelled, thin, supposedly not evil man stare across the table at him with an intensity that was unsettling. “And you wish to engage me in a conversation about what, exactly?”

“Well, we both know why you come all this way, don't we?”

Mycroft couldn't help himself; he felt a faint shiver of excitement in his stomach at the opening gambit of the game, even though he'd known this was the reason he'd travelled thousands of miles at no small personal and professional risk. He might have invested years of effort so that he could avoid just this sort of drudgery, but this moment, the opening moves of the chess match—he never tired of this.

“You wish to trade information for consideration.”

“Yes, sir. As was agreed between various federal parties and myself.”

Mycroft glanced over to Nick Jorgensen, who nodded slightly. 

“Well, Mr Crowder, I suppose you might start with how you came to meet the man you knew as James Moriarty.”

~ + ~

Mycroft didn't think of himself as prone to curiosity. That kind of self-indulgent flaw was a feature of his brother's character, not his. Not that he was _incurious_, exactly; it was more that he rarely had time to indulge in personal or petty concerns. He had a declining empire to run after all, and until human cloning was perfected, there were only so many hours in the day, even for him.

He preferred to think that he'd allowed his attention to be caught by the offhand implication that Jorgenson had dangled in front of him because he was tidy by nature, and not because he was afraid of leaving even one slim and insignificant-seeming thread untied that might later turn into a noose for either him or Sherlock.

On the flight from London to New York, Mycroft had spent most of his time wondering how for the last eight years he'd so persistently failed to prove that Moriarty'd had operations in America. But Moriarty had been protected, and not even Mycroft's growing resources over those years had been enough to penetrate those defences, which itself told a certain kind of tale.

It had always been obvious to him that a nation where criminality was almost endemic, awash with illegal drugs and guns and law enforcement agencies at all levels unable or unwilling to cope, would have been the perfect petrie dish for a disease like Moriarty to thrive. America itself would be like a drug to Moriarty: a vast cauldron of criminal possibility awaiting a mastermind to immerse himself in it, learn its ways, and turn it to his own ends. 

But eastern Kentucky? Mycroft would never have been able to imagine sleek little James Moriarty (either of them) stashed away in the rural hinterland of one of America's most notoriously insular and backward regions. Then again, the venal frontier mentality would have appealed to him. The complete disregard for order. And now one of his former confederates hoped to buy himself a reduced sentence with information about Moriarty's business dealings. Ordinarily, Mycroft would have laughed at the notion, but in his experience Moriarty tended to make the rules of even their topsy-turvy world disappear. 

So Mycroft went to the arse end of west Texas to talk to a run-of-the-mill thug about a dead man—a man that still, beyond the grave, was the greatest threat to Sherlock that Mycroft had ever known. 

And that was how he found himself in a federal maximum security penitentiary, ensconced in a glorified closet with Nick Jorgenson, a Federal Marshall in a cowboy hat (!) and a psychopath whose principal claim to fame seemed to be a multi-year murder spree that hovered on the far periphery of what even Mycroft was capable of imagining.

“Why have you waited until he was dead to tell anyone?”

“We dug coal together.”

Mycroft could only guess at the significance of that statement. He glanced from Crowder to Jorgenson, who appeared just as in the dark as Mycroft. However, while he didn't understand the reasoning, he recognised the consequences. “So why tell the story at all? You can't imagine information about a dead Irishman will gain you much credit with the American government.”

“As I said before, gentlemen, I am not an evil man. But I sure do recognise evil in other men's hearts.” Crowder paused to pass a glance heavy with intimations between Mycroft and Jorgenson, before leaning slightly forward as he settled his gaze back on Mycroft. “And that little fella, he had the devil's own madness in him.”

The words were said as if their speaker thought them conclusive, but Mycroft barely restrained himself from rolling his eyes. He found it hard to believe such superstitious twaddle still existed in the modern world. But then, Crowder seemed to be a man with only a tangential relationship to the modern world beyond its possibilities for cost-effective mechanised killing.

“How did this evil manifest in the world, Mr Crowder?” Mycroft asked in an attempt to move the conversation back to both the tangible world and the point before he was no longer capable of hiding his boredom with the current turn of the conversation. He could tell that Crowder saw through his restraint to the disbelief behind it, though.

“Well, he was responsible for at least one death below ground, to my direct knowledge.”

Mycroft wanted to reply, “So?” He couldn't imagine _one_ murder made Moriarty stand out much from Crowder's circle of acquaintance except perhaps for having such a negligible body count to his credit. Instead, Mycroft asked, “This is what qualifies for the designation of 'evil' in your lexicon?” Mycroft cocked an eyebrow and was glad to see that Crowder caught his reference to the remarkable inconsistency in calling Moriarty evil for killing one man, while at the same time refuting the term for himself despite having been convicted of murdering more than half a dozen, and suspected in a dozen more.

“Oh no, sir.” Crowder startled him with a moray eel-like grin. “That would hardly be indicative of having a healthy self-regard, all things considered. No, it was because he laughed after. And he expected us to laugh, too.”

Mycroft gave him a questioning look.

“You see, when you're down below nothing matters but surviving, and if you want to come out alive you have to know your brothers got your back.” Crowder gave a pointed glance to Mycroft's hands, folded on the table. “I can see you're not a workin' man.”

Mycroft held back a sigh; the pretensions of the working classes and their ideas of “real work” and “real life” never ceased to bore him. Fortunately, his mask of aloof semi-interest was so well made and so well fitted it would take more than a lone madman to dislodge it.

“When you go down below, you put your life in the hands of God and the men around you. Regardless of colour or creed, below you are brothers at war against the demons of fate and fire. If you want to survive, you all survive together, and you have to be able to trust the men around you. And James Moriarty was not a man to be trusted with the lives of his fellows. I knew that the moment he first went below, and events later proved me right.”

It was nowhere near what Mycroft would consider motive; but then, he thought: one of the characteristics of the insane was the irregularity of their motives.

“While I avow I been motivated solely by profit and possess no philosophical attachment to violence, I cannot say the same for the man we are talking about. Between you and me, sir, he truly was a man born to sit at the devil's right hand through all eternity.”

“If that is the case, Mr Crowder, I can assure you that that is his current place of residence. However, how does Moriarty's murder of one of his coal-digging brothers relate to what you've brought me here to tell me?”

“Tommy Jones.”

“The man he killed?”

“Yessir, the man Jimmy killed; he was a bit of a player, if you know what I mean.”

“No, Mr Crowder, I do not know what you mean.”

The man took the rebuke in his stride, only giving Mycroft a sharkish leer. “Let's just say he was a man of diverse interests. Coal's a fickle game, and Tommy had an unfortunate relationship with risk.”

“Weed or Oxy?” the Marshall asked from behind Mycroft. He turned to the man leaning against the closed door, arms crossed. The Marshall ignored him in favour fixing Crowder with a look that Mycroft hoped cultural differences caused him to mis-interpret as bemused affection.

“Meth at first, but he was moving into Oxy big time around then.”

“Who was his supplier?”

“Don't know.”

Mycroft was starting to feel a little left out of the conversation carried on over him. He and Jorgenson shared a glance, and Mycroft sensed that Jorgenson might have some clue as to what was really going on. He made a mental note to grill him later on the drive back to the airport.

“You expect me to believe you had no idea who Tommy Jones' supplier was?” Givens demanded with a choked-down tension in his voice that Mycroft thought not only unnecessary, but probably counter-productive.

“And you believe that James Moriarty murdered Tommy Jones in order to take over his drugs business?” Mycroft asked Crowder, elbowing his way back into the game he was supposed to be running.

“Nosir. I believe he did so because Tommy refused to switch suppliers. To Jimmy himself.”

“Moriarty was in the drugs trade?”

Crowder leant back in his chair with an expression of almost-comical disbelief. “What? You mean to tell me none of these boys told you?” He waved between Givens and Jorgenson, setting up a fierce clanking of his handcuffs and chains on the metal table. “I thought you was supposed to be some foreign hotshot—”

Mycroft waved away the man's false expressions of shock. “What did Moriarty do after killing Jones? Did he take over the man's business?” Crowder exchanged a look over Mycroft's shoulder with Givens and Mycroft suspected he knew exactly who had taken advantage of Tommy Jones' fortuitous murder and absorbed his business. “And where do you come into this?” Mycroft asked, 99.75% sure he knew the answer.

Crowder's mad dog face turned to Mycroft. “Well, Jimmy did have the best deals around. Not the cheapest, but nice, professional delivery boys: always on time, never fucked with the shipments. Better than FedEx.”

“Where did he source?” Givens asked.

“Florida.”

Mycroft felt his insides go cold. To his chagrin, Crowder saw it immediately. He waggled a finger at Mycroft. “Ah, I just saw the lights go on in there. Sparkly, like a welder closing a seam.” He leant over the table again, his conspiratorial leer a sham of submission veneered over self-congratulation. “You're building somethin' up in there, little bit at a time. Got yourself a bit from here and a bit from there. And I just gave you a big bit, didn't I?”

“Names, Mr Cowder. Names—depending on who they are—might, in the right circumstances, be considered a 'big bit'. What you've given me is nothing more than innuendo and hearsay. Gossip about dead men and coal mining, none of it relevant.”

“Bet you'd like some of them Florida names, wouldn't you?”

Mycroft didn't reply because he knew he didn't need to: Crowder's infatuation with his own perceived self-importance meant he wouldn't be able to stop himself from talking and talking until he'd blabbed everything he knew. And by the time the tale was fully told, with all the extraneous verbiage Mycroft expected from an apocalyptic narcissist, Mycroft had what he'd come for: the last details, the final threads tied. The case was now neatness itself and Mycroft felt himself relax just a little.

Crowder seemed to have come to some sort of journey's end, as well, Mycroft thought. The interview was coming to an end and Mycroft turned to Jorgenson to let him know he was done.

“You don't kill killers where you come from, do you?” Crowder asked.

Mycroft turned to him, a little surprised by the question. “Not for some time, no.”

“Well, I'm sure a clever fella like you knows we're not so civilized here in the good ole U.S. of A. But we breed killers like dogs in this country, so maybe that's just the way it's gotta be.” Crowder tilted his head at an unnatural angle and gave Mycroft another of his fulsomely toothy smiles. “I'm going to hell, sir, and well deserved it will be. ”

Mycroft had no idea how to respond to that assertion. He possessed the usual Englishman's discomfort in the face of overt religiosity, especially the more fantastical varieties so common in America. He wondered if Crowder had said it solely to wrong-foot him, but on reflection didn't think so.

“Well, if that's the case Mr Crowder, perhaps you can give him a message from me.”

“I certainly will, sir.”

For the first time since seating himself, Mycroft moved, leaning over the table to Crowder as if to share a confidence. “Tell him Sherlock says good-bye.”


End file.
